Life in the Lancashire village of Riggan is dominated by the coal pit, for it not only provides employment for most of the villagers, but it is also the focus for most of the communities hopes and fears. Joan Lowrie, one of the pit girls, who has endured many hardships herself comes to the rescue of seventeen-year-old Liz and her baby.

That Lass o' Lowrie's is set in Lankashire and recounts the life of Joan Lowrie, a young woman raised in the impoverished mining town. Joan tries to rise herself above the grim background and move up socially, as she falls in love with a man of a higher social status.

That Lass o' Lowrie's is set in Lankashire and recounts the life of Joan Lowrie, a young woman raised in the impoverished mining town. Joan tries to rise herself above the grim background and move up socially, as she falls in love with a man of a higher social status.

In telling a tale of Lancashire life Frances Hodgson was on familiar ground. Brought up in the world's first industrial city she would have been all too aware of the lot of working women - whether they toiled in the coal pit or a spinning mill. However, she did not begin to write until the family migrated to America following her father's death and their subsequent fall into poverty as a result of the Lancashire Cotton Famine caused by the American Civil War. Here she married Swan Burnet in 1872. That Lass O' Lowrie's was her first novel, but by no means her worst. A dark portrait of pit village life and yet a joyous and uplifting read. Published to raise funds for the Working Class Movement Library, Salford, M5 4WX.

The Lancashire village of Riggan is dominated by the pit, for it not only provides employment to most of those who live there, but is also a focus for the community's hopes and fears, and the place where friendships are made and lost. Joan Lowrie, one of the pit girls, has endured hardship, and beatings from her father, for as long as she can remember, but her pride, determination to rise above her lot, and natural intelligence make her stand apart from the other girls. So it is Joan who comes to the rescue of seventeen-year-old Liz, left to care for her young baby alone and taunted by the others. And it is Joan who attracts the attention of two very different men: Paul Grace, the local curate, longs to help her, but finds himself unable to master his shyness and reach her; his friend Fergus Derrick, the mining engineer, is also intrigued by her. Then the new vicar's daughter, Anice Barholm, whom Grace loves with a gentle passion, comes to Riggan. Generous and warm, she is quickly taken into the heart of the community, and becomes firm friends with Fergus. As Paul sees the two drawn together in sympathetic understanding, he feels his own inadequacies underlined, and fears he may lose everything .... Published in 1878, this is the first novel by the author of The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Frances Hodgson Burnett is remembered today as the author of the children’s classic The Secret Garden, but in her lifetime she had a long and successful career as a novelist, dramatist and writer of children’s stories. Of high literary quality, her novels covered a range of genres, including industrial novels, American-themed social novels, historical novels, transatlantic novels and post–World War I novels. The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett reads her novels in the context of the changing literary field in England and the United States in the years between the death of George Eliot in 1880 through to the Great War. Read as a body of literary fiction in relation to Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James and T. S. Eliot among others, and read in the context of literary realism, historical fiction, the sensation novel and so on, Burnett’s novels constitute an important thread that chronicles the changing contexts and forms of English and American fiction from the end of the Victorian period to the Jazz Age of the 1920s.